A Short Biography
William Davies
Garrod came from a family of great academic distinction, some of whose members are still active today: while her paternal greatgrandfather was an estate agent in Ipswich, Suffolk, his son was Sir Alfred Garrod (1819–1907), Physician Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, who evolved the “Thread Test” for uric acid in the blood and also coined the term “Rheumatoid Arthritis” (Caton-Thompson 1969). His three sons became equally eminent: Alfred Henry (1846–1879) was an F.R.S. at the age of 30 for his work in physiology and zoology, and is best-remembered for his work in the re-classification of birds; Herbert Baring (1849–1912) won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry at Oxford, and wrote upon Dante, Goethe and Calderon; Sir Archibald (1857–1936), Garrod’s father, was also an F.R.S., and was the first Professor of Medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and later the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford; he is regarded as the founder of biochemical genetics (ibid.).Garrod thus shared a similar upper-middle class background to Nina Layard: the
families knew each other well, probably because they both derived from south Suffolk (the Garrods lived in Melton). Layard was the cousin of Sir Henry Layard, the excavator of Nineveh, and began excavations in East Anglia in the late nineteenth century (see later, and Plunkett, this volume).
Dorothy Garrod was educated mainly at home, until the year before she came up to Cambridge, when she attended Birklands School, St. Albans. Her academic career began at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1913, where she read History. Owing to illness, she obtained an Aegrotatin her Part I; she obtained a Class 11:2 degree in 1916 owing to a complex mixture of factors, probably including the death of one of her brothers (Thomas) earlier that year on the killing fields of France (Smith, pers. comm.; Caton-Thompson 1969). She was also deeply involved with a young man, although he too was killed in the Great War (Lovedy Smith to Callander, pers. comm.). In 1917 she joined the Ministry of Munitions as a Clerk, but soon left to take a more active role in the war effort, serving in France and the Rhineland as an Assistant in the Catholic Women’s League huts, nursing the wounded and the dying. She had converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism during World War I (Caton-Thompson 1969), although she did not tell her parents for some years afterwards (Callander, pers. comm.); it is not known why she converted. Her other two brothers were dead by the time she had left the Catholic Women’s League: Noel was killed in 1917 in France, and Basil died in the influenza pandemic of 1919 in Cologne, shortly before he was to be demobilised (Caton-Thompson 1969). By 1919, Garrod was feeling the full force of parental expectations as the only surviving child:
“The tragedy left a permanent imprint... for they were a devoted and integrated family. She once told me that she resolved, at that dreadful time, to try to compensate her parents, as far as lay in her power, by achieving a life they could feel worthy of the family tradition.”
(ibid.: 341)
However, there was a problem: she was then undecided about a field in which to specialise. She was a good draughtsman, and once seriously considered specialising in architecture (ibid.).In 1919, after she had nothing left to keep her in the Rhineland, she joined her parents in Malta, where she was encouraged by her father to study some of the antiquities. Garrod’s father died in 1936, and so never lived to see his daughter become the first female Professor in Cambridge; this was perhaps one of her greatest regrets: “I wish my father had been alive, and the others [her brothers]” (ibid.:340).
In 1921, she decided to enrol for the Archaeology Diploma at Oxford, under the direction of Professor Robert Ranulph Marett; Henry Field, D. Talbot Rice and Francis Turville-Petre were among her fellow-students (ibid.). She had met the Abbé Breuil that summer while staying at Ussat (Ariège), and had become enthused about Palaeolithic art, visiting the caves of Niaux and Tuc d’Audoubert:
“...we also met the Abbé Breuil, who knows more than anyone about these things, and explores caves in a Roman collar and a bathing dress.” (letter to cousin)
The next academic year (1922–1923), having obtained a Distinction in her Diploma, she set out for Paris to “perfect her knowledge of Prehistory” (Breuil: in Garrod, this volume) with references from Professors Sollas and Marett, and funded by a Newnham College Travelling Grant. When she showed her willingness to analyse and discuss Commont’s work on the Somme gravels, Breuil was assured of her industry and intelligence, “trying to really understand the subject and possessing a justifiably critical mind” (ibid.). She gained valuable experience in summer (1923–1924) at excavations run by Henri Martin (La Quina, with its Neanderthals in a Mousterian context), the Saint-Périers (Isturitz), Peyrony, Pittard and Bouyssonie.
With encouragement from Breuil, Garrod started research for her book on the British Upper Palaeolithic in 1924 (see Roberts, this
volume), and finished writing it in 1925. Breuil may have been one of the driving forces behind this project: as a prehistorian with global interests, he would have been particularly interested to have the British Upper Palaeolithic codified and brought into line with the rest of [Western] Europe. Garrod described her book, The Upper PalaeolithicAgeinBritain,as her “thesis”, and indeed she received a B.Sc. from Oxford in 1924 for her work on this. She experienced problems with the British record, as many sites were poorlyexcavated and were typologically ambiguous (see Jacobi, Swainston, this volume); she also described and named a new late Upper Palaeolithic industry, the “Creswellian”, after Creswell Crags in Derbyshire (see Roberts, Charles, this volume). During the writing and research for her book, Garrod also seems to have maintained strong links with Nina Layard, as an addendum to her book demonstrates:
“Miss Layard has kindly given me permission to mention that she has recently discovered an industry which appears to be Upper Palaeolithic in a deposit of the Colne Valley in Essex. The implements bear a strong resemblance to those from the Middle zone of Mother Grundy’s Parlour, and would appear to be late ‘Creswellian’.”
(Garrod 1926a: 194)
Layard had been Vice-President of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia (PSEA) in 1920, and President in 1921, the first woman to achieve this. Her trail-blazing path and her advanced use of excavation technique (she was one of the first Palaeolithic specialists to use three-dimensional recording techniques, from ca.1902: Plunkett, this volume) must have given Garrod an idea of what could be achieved by women in archaeology. Unlike Layard, Garrod did not have to serve on the Committee of the PSEA before being elected Vice-President (to Marett’s President) in 1927: her success in Gibraltar had ensured that she was now one of the best-known prehistorians in the country. Her Presidential year (1928) was marked by a speech, “Nova etvetera”, which attempted to re-define the applications of Palaeolithic archaeology, placing the emphasis
more upon the behaviours of past peoples and less upon issues of the general stratigraphic succession.
Her lack of success in excavating Kent’s Cavern, Devon (see Roberts, this volume), encouraged her to think about digging outside Britain. However, she did return to work briefly in her home country in 1927, excavating at Langwith Cave between April 11th and the 28th, after her excavations at Gibraltar had finished (Callander, pers. comm.). These explorations effectively marked the end of her major work in Britain and she subsequently only excavated abroad.
Gibraltar marked a turning-point in her career (see Stringer etal., this volume): henceforth she would appear to move seamlessly from one project to another, to the extent that some were truncated by new work. Frustrated by her lack of success in working at Kent’s Cavern in Devon, she was encouraged by Breuil to try a site which he believed had potential. He had made preliminary soundings at Devil’s Tower while posted in Gibraltar in 1917 and 1919, and had found some Mousterian artefacts. As Garrod (1961) later remarked, he “waived his rights as discoverer” of the site, and the results from her seven months of excavations between November 1925 and December 1926 had a great impact. On the 11th June, Garrod’s team uncovered the skull fragments of a Neanderthal child, and the telegram sent to her family at 85, Banbury Road, Oxford, at 8.20 pm on 12th June is typically terse: “FOUND MOUSTERIAN SKULL”. She called this child “Abel”, perhaps to suggest the voice of our “brother” calling from the soil (see Genesis 4). An article on the excavation in the Illustrated London News appeared on 28th August, 1926, quoting what Garrod had told the Oxford meeting of the Anthropology section of the British Association (Garrod 1926b): “She said that the Mousterian age of the skull was beyond doubt, and this opinion was confirmed during the subsequent discussion by the Abbé Breuil and Sir Arthur Keith.” She had aged the skull fragments as those of a five-year-old child, and current research now favours an age between three to four years of age (Dean etal.1986).
People were impressed by the clarity of both her exposition and her excavation at Gibraltar. She was awarded the PrixHollandaisby the Institut Internationale d’Anthropologie in Amsterdam in 1927, and was chosen at the same meeting to be the British representative on the International Commission to inspect the site of Glozel, which had been a thorn in the side of Archaeology since 1921 (see Bahn and Renfrew, this volume):
“The difficulty in selecting members was to get archaeologists who had not already said in public what they thought about Glozel, or were not known to hold extreme views in private about the dispute. This probably explains why I was chosen. I was young, I had just finished excavating at Gibraltar, and I certainly wasn’t what you might call a very well-known prehistorian. They were looking round for people who didn’t already know too much about Glozel and who might be expected to take a fairly objective view about the whole affair.”
(Garrod 1968: 173)
On 25th September, 1927, M. Vergne (Director of Museum at Villeneuve-sur-Lot) had been surprised by a storm at Glozel, and took refuge in a disused stable on the farm; there he discovered the tools used by the sculptor, half-baked, inscribed clay tablets and halfcarved schist pebbles (Daniel 1968). The Commission set to work in November 1927, scattering coins at random and excavating where they fell, yet never found any Palaeolithic objects, suggesting that the forgers found it easier to replicate pottery, etc..Although Garrod found the proceedings ridiculous, there is no evidence to suggest that she found them funny: having been the youngest member of the commission, she remained a target of vituperation long after most of the other members had died (only Prof. Bosch-Gimpera survived her): “attacks on the commission that have recently started up have been directed at me” (Garrod 1968: 173). In 1990, Fradin still referred to Garrod in extremely offensive terms (see Bahn and Renfrew, this volume).
The main protagonists of the site were Reinach, who likened the unbelievers to the Inquisition versus Galileo, and a local doctor
called Morlet, who had unwisely offered money to the Fradins from 1925 onwards to defray their expenses and to encourage further exploration.
“Morlet had rather strange ideas and was a very excitable and uncritical person. He did not realise that Emile Fradin was merely reproducing objects which he saw in the various archaeological books which were being lent to him.”
(Garrod 1968: 172)
Prior to the activities of the Commission, “approved” people were permitted to open trenches at Glozel; even the King of Romania had his own trench (Jordan 1978)! The Commission reached the predictable conclusion that Glozel was archaeologically-valueless, and the Law moved in:
“Five policemen and a commissionaire proceeded to the Fradins’ farm, took the inhabitants completely by surprise, searched the premises and found unfinished tools and Glozelian objects, including inscibed tablets of clay drying in the rafters of a barn.”
(Garrod 1968: 176)
The subsequent police investigation and trial cleared the Fradins of fraud, but open wounds remained. Garrod, accused of trying to “frame” the protagonists of Glozel, was probably glad that she had left France before the report was published:
“I ...left for the Near East in 1928: I began my first tour there about a month after the appearance of our report. I became absorbed in other interests and hardly gave a thought to Glozel again.”
(Garrod 1968: 177)
In March 1928, on the strength of her work in Gibraltar, Garrod was asked to become a student at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, and then invited out to southern Kurdistan by the Iraq Department of Antiquities (Caton-Thompson 1969). This was a preliminary exploration: she found Mousterian flakes on ground near Kirkuk, but returned to British Mandate Palestine after only a few
weeks to take up the chance to excavate Shukbah Cave between April-June 1928, where she uncovered abundant human remains, associated with a microlithic industry which she attributed to the Mesolithic, and named “Natufian” after the Wady en-Natuf (see Boyd, Valla, this volume). Underlying the Natufian, in layer D, Garrod found what Breuil called the “Aurignacio-Mousterian” (Garrod 1928: 182), together with traces of human remains. Publication of Shukbah was delayed until 1942 because she had planned to return there for another season [in 1929]; however, major events were about to occur which would change her life.
Figure 1.1: Garrod surveying a cave site in the Near East. A trowel, on disturbed earth in the talus, can clearly be seen at the foot of the rock face on the righthand side of the photograph. (Photograph courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University ofOxford.)
Between November and December 1928, Garrod returned to southern Kurdistan in the company of Francis Turville-Petre and others, and excavated the Mousterian site of Hazar Merd and the Late Upper Palaeolithic site of Zarzi (see Wahida, this volume). An armed guard was provided during the excavations, but they were
not the victims of any violence; after the horrors of World War I it seems that Garrod was prepared for anything. Several of the Kurdish villagers were employed by Garrod’s team, and her presence caused much bemusement: she was the first person to search for Palaeolithic material in this region.
In 1929, Garrod was elected a research fellow at Newnham College for three years, and began work at Mount Carmel (el-Wad) between April and June (Figure 1.2). Mount Carmel, an area of surpassing archaeological interest, came perilously close to being blasted to oblivion in order to provide enough rock for the construction of the harbour at Haifa (Callander, pers. comm.).
However, Garrod’s work between 1929–1934 (21½ months in total) at el-Wad and then at the Mugharet-et-Tabun, was to prove one of her most impressive achievements. The cave of Skhul was also under her general direction, but directed by her Assistant, T.D. McCown. The work of the British and American Schools in Jerusalem helped to set the “Aurignacio-Mousterian” from Shukbah into a more detailed sequence.
Garrod was lucky to have had T.D. McCown (from the American School) as her Assistant, and also in the quality of the students: Hallam Movius, T.P. O’Brien, Jaquetta Hopkins (later Hawkes), Mary Kitson Clark (later Chitty) and Joan Crowfoot (later Payne) (CatonThompson 1969). When she was unavoidably absent in the spring of 1932, the Mousterian human remains from Skhul were recovered under the direction of McCown. She showed nothing but praise for her Assistant’s handling of the excavation, although she always regretted being absent.
Her method of excavation at these sites was noteworthy: local Arab women were preferred, as they worked well, and the money they were paid would go to supply the needs of their families; men were employed to do heavier work. Garrod herself did not excavate, but supervised the analysis of the finds (92,000 implements detailed!: ibid.).The removal of two of the Skhul skeletons was even
recorded on cine-film, showing a notable degree of historical foresight (McCown’s? – Garrod was absent).
For her final year on Mount Carmel (1933–1934), Garrod obtained a Leverhulme Fellowship. The strain since 1931 had been intense, as McCown was fully engaged in the examination of the human skeletal material from Carmel in conjunction with Sir Arthur Keith. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, published in 1937, was a major achievement, gaining her a D.Sc. from Oxford; the implications of her work are considered in this volume by BelferCohen and Bar-Yosef. Between the 4th and 7th April, 1935, Garrod had surveyed the Atlit quarries (see Ronen et al., this volume), and was the first person to record a Mousterian open-air site on the Carmel coastal plain.
In 1936, Garrod was elected President of Section H (Anthropology) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and gave a speech which made a major re-interpretation of
Figure 1.2: Mount Carmel, 1931 season: (left to right) Theodore D. McCown, Dorothy Garrod and Francis Turville-Petre. (Photograph courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University ofOxford.)
the Eurasian Palaeolithic. She revised and shortened this paper two years later for publication in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society (1938), redesigning it with the help of Breuil to attack Peyrony’s (1933) new scheme for the Aurignacian (sensu lato) of Breuil (1912). She invented the terms “Chatelperronian” and “Gravettian” in this paper, although the full implications of her re-working took some time to take effect (see Davies, this volume).
Accompanied by James Gaul and Bruce Howe from the American School of Prehistoric Research, Garrod set off in the summer of 1938 to reconnoitre Anatolia with a view to assess its value as a geographical bridge between Palestine and Europe. Caton-Thompson (1969: 352) had begged her to work in Sinai instead, but Garrod (1936) had already proclaimed herself more concerned with a “mirage orientale” than a “mirage africain”. Although some material was discovered in Anatolia, the bureaucratic obstacles placed in her way frustrated her greatly, and after several weeks she determined to try Bulgaria instead (suggested by O.G.S. Crawford and Christopher Hawkes in 1937). The trio spent the rest of their expedition time in Bulgaria (July-August), gaining permission to excavate at Bacho Kiro on 25th July, and working there until August 8th.
A local amateur speleologist from Drenovo, Dimiter Bachev, was the first to explore the cave interior in 1935/6 (Garrod etal.1939); he made some soundings in a remote part of the cave, obtaining the flint implements and cave bear bones seen by Garrod in the Natural History Museum, Sofia: “As a result of his discoveries the cave was visited by representatives of the Royal Institute and the National Museum, but the soundings made on these occasions failed to reach a Palaeolithic level” (ibid.: 54). Garrod and her team were to have problems with Bachev: none of her finds from reliable deposits matched the ones he had taken to the Sofia museum, and she may have suspected that she was dealing with another Glozel, where finds miraculously appeared in disturbed deposits. Her notes are more eloquent on the subject than her final report:
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yet found in that country In the same temple we found also statues of sacred animals and pottery which we now know to belong to the very beginning of Egyptian history, many centuries before the pyramids, and probably about 5000 B C or earlier
"The next step was the finding of a new cemetery and a town of the prehistoric people, which we can now date to about 5000 B. C , within two or three centuries either way This place lay on the opposite side of the Nile to Koptos that is to say, about 20 miles north of Thebes At first we were completely staggered by a class of objects entirely different from any yet known in Egypt We tried to fit them into every gap in Egyptian history, but found that it was impossible to put them before 3000 B C Later discoveries prove that they are really as old as 5000 B. C. They show a very different civilization from that of the Egyptians whom we already know far less artistic, but in some respects even more skillful in mechanical taste and touch than the historical Egyptians They built brick houses to live in, and buried their dead in small chambers sunk in the gravels of the water courses, lined with mats, and roofed over with beams. They show several points of contact with the early Mediterranean civilization, and appear to have been mainly north African tribes of European type Their pottery, in its patterns and painting, shows designs which have survived almost unchanged unto the present day among the Kabyles of the Algerian Mountains And one very peculiar type of pottery is found spread from Spain to Egypt, and indicates a widespread commercial intercourse at that remote day The frequent figures upon the vases of great galley ships rowed with oars show that shipping was well developed then, and make the evidences of trading between different countries easy to be accepted.
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"An of the above belongs to the age probably before 4700 B. C , which is the age given for the first historical king of Egypt by the Greek history of Manetho. A keystone of our knowledge of the civilization is the identification of the tomb of Mena, the first name in Egyptian history, the venerated founder of all the long series of hundreds of historic kings. This tomb, about 15 miles north of Thebes, was found by some Arabs, and shown to Dr De Morgan, the director of the Department of Antiquities. It was a mass of about thirty chambers, built of mud brick and earth Each chamber contained a different class of objects, one of stone vases, one of stone dishes, one of copper tools, one of water jars, etc And among the things are carvings of lions and vases in rock crystal and obsidian, large hard-stone vases, slate palettes for grinding paint, pottery vases, and, above all, an ivory tablet with relief carvings which show the names of the king Besides this, M Amelineau has found sixteen tombs of this same general character at Abydos, which we can hardly now doubt belong to the early kings of the first three dynasties, and some four or five have been actually identified with the
names of these kings in the Greek history So now instead of treating the first three dynasties as half fabulous and saying that Egyptian art and civilization begin full blown at 4000 B C , we have the clear and tangible remains of much of these early kings back to 4700 B C , and a stretch of some centuries of the prehistoric period with a varied and distinctive civilization, well known and quite different from anything later, lying before 4700 B. C. To put the earlier part of this to 5500 B C is certainly no stretch of probability. …
"We now pass entirely from these early times, with their fascinating insight into the beginnings of things, long before any other human history that we possess, until we reach down to what seems quite modern times in the record of Egypt, where it comes into contact with the Old Testament history. On clearing out the funereal temple of King Merenptah I found in that the upper half of a fine colossal statue of his, with all the colors still fresh upon it As this son of Rameses the Great is generally believed to be the Pharaoh of the exodus, such a fine portrait of him is full of interest Better even than that I found an immense tablet of black granite over 10 feet high and 5 feet wide It had been erected over two centuries before and brilliantly carved by an earlier king, whose temple was destroyed for materials by Merenptah He took this splendid block and turned its face inward against the wall of his temple and carved the back of it with other scenes and long inscriptions Most of it is occupied with the history of his vanquishing the Libyans, or North African tribes, who were then invading Egypt But at the end he recounts his conquests in Syria, among which occurs the priceless passage: 'The people of Israel are spoiled; they have no seed ' This is the only trace yet found in Egypt of the existence of the Israelites, the only mention of the name, and it is several centuries earlier than the references to the Israelite and Jewish kings in the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria "What relation this has to our biblical knowledge of the Israelites is a wide question, that has several possible answers Without entering on all the openings, I may here state what seems to me to be the most probable connection of all the events, though I am quite aware that fresh discoveries might easily alter our views It seems that either all the Israelites did not go into Egypt or else a part returned and lived in the north of Palestine before the exodus that we know, because we here find Merenptah defeating Israelites at about 1200 B. C. Of his conquest and of those of Rameses III in Palestine there are no traces in the biblical accounts, the absence of which indicates that the entry into Canaan took place after 1160 B C , the last war of Rameses III Then the period of the Judges is given in a triple record (l) of the north, (2) of the east of the Jordan, (3) of Ephraim and the west; and these three accounts are quite distinct and never overlap, though the history passes in succession from one to another Thus the whole age of Judges is but little over a century. And to this agree the priestly genealogies stretching between the tabernacle and temple periods.
"Leaving now all the monumental age, we come lastly to the evidences of the Christian period, preserved in the papyri or miscellaneous waste papers left behind in the towns of the Roman times Last winter my friends, Mr Grenfell and Mr Hunt, cleared out the remains of the town Behnesa, about 110 miles south of Cairo There, amid thousands of stray papers, documents, rolls, accounts, and all the waste sweepings out of the city offices, they found two leaves which are priceless in Christian literature the leaf of Logia, or sayings of Jesus, and the leaf of Matthew's Gospel The leaf of the Logia is already so widely known that it is needless for me to describe it The leaf of Matthew's Gospel is of great interest in the literary history of the Gospels. Hitherto we have had no manuscripts older than the second great ecclesiastical settlement under Theodosius. Now we have a piece two ages earlier before the first settlement of things under Constantine at the council of Nicea. Here, in the middle of the third century, we find that the beginning of the Gospel, the most artificial, and probably the latest, part, the introductory genealogy and account of the Nativity, was exactly in its present form. This gives us the greatest confidence that the Gospel as we have it dates from the time of the great persecutions Such are some of the astonishing and far-reaching results that Egypt has given us within three years past "
W. M. Flinders Petrie, Recent Research in Egypt (Sunday School Times, February 19, 1898.)
In a later article, contributed to the "Popular Science Monthly," Professor Petrie has described more fully the results of recent exploration in Egypt, especially with reference to the discovery and study of prehistoric remains. The following are passages from the article: "The great stride that has been made in the last six years is the opening up of prehistoric Egypt, leading us back some 2000 years before the time of the pyramid builders. Till recently nothing was known before the age of the finest art and the greatest buildings, and it was a familiar puzzle how such a grand civilization could have left no traces of its rise This was only a case of blindness on the part of explorers. Upper Egypt teems with prehistoric remains, but, as most of what appears is dug up by plunderers for the market, until there is a demand for a class of objects, very little is seen of them Now that the prehistoric has become fashionable, it is everywhere to be seen The earlier diggers were dazzled by the polished colossi, the massive buildings, the brilliant sculptures of the well-known historic times, and they had no eyes for small graves, containing only a few jars or, at best, a flint knife.
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"The present position of the prehistory of Egypt is that we can now distinguish two separate cultures before the beginning
of the Egyptian dynasties, and we can clearly trace a sequence of manufactures and art throughout long ages before the pyramid builders, or from say 6000 B C , giving a continuous history of 8000 years for man in Egypt Continuous I say advisedly, for some of the prehistoric ways are those kept up to the present time. In the earliest stages of this prehistoric culture metal was already used and pottery made Why no ruder stages are found is perhaps explained by the fact that the alluvial deposits of the Nile do not seem to be much older than 8000 years. The rate of deposit is well known very closely one metre in a thousand years and borings show only eight metres thick of Nile mud in the valley. Before that the country had enough rain to keep up the volume of the river, and it did not drop its mud. It must have run as a rapid stream through a barren land of sand and stones, which could not support any population except paleolithic hunters. With the further drying of the climate, the river lost so much velocity that its mud was deposited, and the fertile mud flats made cultivation and a higher civilization possible At this point a people already using copper came into the country. …
"The second prehistoric civilization seems to have belonged to a people kindred to that of the first age, as much of the pottery continued unchanged, and only gradually faded away But a new style arose of a hard, buff pottery, painted with patterns and subjects in red outline Ships are represented with cabins on them, and rowed by a long bank of oars The use of copper became more general, and gold and silver appear also Though this civilization was in many respects higher than that which preceded it, yet it was lower artistically, the figures being ruder and always flat, instead of in the round
"The separation of these two different ages has been entirely reached by the classification of many hundreds of tombs, the original order of which could be traced by the relation of their contents. … The material for this study has come entirely from excavations of my own party at Nagada (1895), Abadiyeh, and Hu (1899); but great numbers of tombs of these same ages have been opened without record by Dr de Morgan (1896-1897), and by French and Arab speculators in antiquities The connection between these prehistoric ages and the early historic times of the dynastic kings of Egypt is yet obscure The cemeteries which would have cleared this have unhappily been looted in the last few years without any record, and it is only the chance of some new discoveries that can be looked to for filling up the history.
"We can at least say that the pottery of the early kings is clearly derived from the later prehistoric types, and that much of the civilization was in common But it is clear that the second prehistoric civilization was degrading and losing its artistic taste for fine work before the new wave of the dynastic or historic Egyptians came in upon it. These early historic people are mainly known by the remains of the tombs of the early kings, found by M. Amelineau at Abydos
(1896-1899), and probably the first stage of the same race is seen in the rude colossi of the god Min, which I found at Koptos (1894) In these great discoveries of the last few years we can trace at least three successive peoples, and see the gradual rise of the arts, from the man who was buried in his goat skins, with one plain cup by him, up to the king who built great monuments and was surrounded by most sumptuous handiwork. We see the rise of the art of exquisite flint flaking, and the decline of that as copper came more commonly into use. We see at first the use of signs, later on disused by a second race, and then superseded by the elaborate hieroglyph system of the dynastic race. …
"Turning now to the purely classical Egyptian work, the principal discoveries of the last few years have given us new leading examples in every line. The great copper statue of King Pepy, with his son, dates from before 3000 B C It is over life size, and entirely wrought in hammered copper, showing a complete mastery in metal work of the highest artistic power. … Many of the royal temples of the 19th dynasty at Thebes were explored by the English in 1896 The Ramesseum was completely examined, through all the maze of stone chambers around it But the most important result was the magnificent tablet of black granite, about 10 feet high and 5 wide, covered on one side with an inscription of Amen Hotep III, and on the other side with an inscription of Merenptah The latter account, of about 1200 B C , mentions the war with the 'People of Israel'; this is the only naming of Israel on Egyptian records, and is several centuries earlier than any Assyrian record of the Hebrews
"One of the most important results of historical Egyptian times is the light thrown on prehistoric Greek ages. The pottery known as 'Mykenæan' since the discoveries of Schliemann in the Peloponnesus was first dated in Egypt at Gurob in 1889; next were found hundreds of vase fragments at Tell el Amarna in 1892; and since then several Egyptian kings' names have been found on objects in Greece, along with such pottery. The whole of this evidence shows that the grand age of prehistoric Greece, which can well compare with the art of classical Greece, began about 1600 B. C., was at its highest point about 1400 B C , and became decadent about 1200 B C , before its overthrow by the Dorian invasion. Besides this dating, Greece is indebted to Egypt for the preservation of the oldest texts of its classics."
W. M. Flinders Petrie, Recent Years of Egyptian Exploration (Appleton's Popular Science Monthly, April, 1900).
Still later, in an address at the annual meeting of the Egypt Exploration Fund, November 7, 1900, Professor Petrie summed up with succinctness the gains to our knowledge of early man from the later researches in Egypt "How many controversies," he said, "had waged over Manetho! And now from the Royal tombs of Abydos we had seen and handled this summer the drinking bowls and
furniture of the Kings of the first dynasty, even the property of Menes himself, the first King of United Egypt The early Kings, whom we had scarcely believed in, even Mena who had been proclaimed a mythical version of the Cretan Minos and the Indian Manu, came now before us as real and as familiarly as the Kings of the 30th dynasty or of Saxon England; and never before had so remote a period been brought so completely before us as it had been in the work this year at Abydos. {21}
And how did Manetho and the State history of Seti bear the test? Five Kings we could already identify out of the eight recorded for the first dynasty. Those five are proved to have been recorded in their correct order, although the time of the first dynasty was so remote from even that of Seti that all the names had become slightly altered by transmission It was to be remembered that the first dynasty was older to Seti than the Exodus was to us Now that we were no longer afraid of our own rashness in assigning anything to a date before the fourth dynasty, and could deal with the earliest periods back to the first entry of agricultural man into Egypt, we could see more of the perspective of history We saw palæolithic man scattering his massive flint weapons until the age of Nile mud (beginning about 7000 B C ) made agriculture possible, and a Caucasian race ousted the palæolithic folks, whose portraits were left us in the figures found in the earliest graves We saw this oldest race of man to have been of the Hottentot type, but even more hairy than the Hottentot, with the traces of his original Northern habitation not yet wiped off by tropical suns Then we saw a rapidly rising civilization already knowing metals linked with the modern Kabyle both by bodily formation and by existing products. Next after some dozen generations we could trace strong Eastern or Semitic influence, which carried on this civilization to a higher point in many respects; and then decay set in and the first cycle that we could trace was completed. The next cycle began with the entry of the dynastic race from the Red Sea, possessing the elements of hieroglyphic writing and far more artistic sense and power than the earlier people In some three or four centuries they had gradually conquered and invaded all the races scattered through Egypt long-haired, short-haired, bearded and unbearded, clothed and unclothed; and the first King of all Egypt, who founded his new capital at the mouth of the valley, was Mena. The era of consolidation which preceded him was stated by Manetho as the dynasty of ten Kings of Abydos, who reigned for 300 years; it was a time of rapidly increasing civilization, during which most of the main features of Egyptian language, life, and art were stamped for 5,000 years to come From the Royal tombs of Abydos we could see now how this art rose to its finest age in the middle of the first dynasty, and was decaying and becoming cheaper and more common by the end of that time Probably we should see that this cycle was fading when some new impetus gave birth to the colossal ages of the pyramid builders That grand period we now see to have been the third cycle of civilization and art, which was renewed again and again until we might see in the brilliance of the Fatimite dynasty the seventh of the
great eras of Egypt Such was the wider aspect of human history which the work solely of English exploration in Egypt now put before us It might be safely said that there had never been a greater extension of knowledge of man's past in any decade than the discoveries of the last five years had unfolded. Details yet awaited us, but the main lines were all marked out, and their work of the future was to complete the picture of which we now had the full extent before us. What, now, would occupy the coming winter was the exploration of the remaining Royal tombs."
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Egypt:
Discovery of a fragment of the Logia, or Sayings of Jesus
During the winter of 1896-1897, Messrs Bernard P Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt conducted excavations for the Egypt Exploration Fund on the site of Oxyrhynchus, which was a flourishing city in the time of Roman rule in Egypt. Large quantities of papyri were found in the rubbish heaps of the town, and among them one fragment of special and remarkable interest, as thus described by the discoverers, in a brief report, entitled "Sayings of Our Lord," published by the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1897: "The document in question is a leaf from a papyrus book containing a collection of Logia or Sayings of our Lord, of which some, though presenting several novel features, are familiar, others are wholly new It was found at the very beginning of our work upon the town, in a mound which produced a great number of papyri belonging to the first three centuries of our era, those in the immediate vicinity of our fragment belonging to the second and third centuries. This fact, together with the evidence of the handwriting, which has a characteristically Roman aspect, fixes with certainty 300 A. D. as the lowest limit for the date at which the papyrus was written The general probabilities of the case, the presence of the usual contractions found in biblical MSS , and the fact that the papyrus was in book, not roll, form, put the first century out of the question, and made the first half of the second unlikely. The date therefore probably falls within the period 150-300 A D More than that cannot be said with any approach to certainty. … The fragment measures 5¾X3¾ inches, but its height was originally somewhat greater, as it is unfortunately broken at the bottom."
The following is a translation of the fragmentary sayings inscribed on the leaf:
" and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote that is in thy brother's eye "
"Jesus saith, Except ye fast to the world, ye shall in no wise find the kingdom of God; and except ye keep the sabbath, ye shall not see the Father"
"Jesus saith, I stood in the midst of the world, and in the flesh was I seen of them, and I found all men drunken, and
none found I athirst among them, and my soul grieveth over the sons of men, because they are blind in their heart "
"Jesus saith, Wherever there are and there is one alone, I am with him Raise the stone and there thou shalt find me, cleave the wood and there am I."
"Jesus saith, A prophet is not acceptable in his own country, neither doth a physician work cures upon them that know him "
"Jesus saith, A city built upon the top of a high hill, and stablished, can neither fall nor be hid."
{22}
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH:Egypt:
New discoveries in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings
In the Valley of the Kings, which extends along the west bank of the Nile, in the Libyan Mountains, opposite Luxor, M. Loret, director of the Egyptian explorations, discovered in 1898 the tombs of Thutmosis III. and Amenophis II., and in the following year made the more important discovery of the tomb of Thutmosis I , "the real founder of the eighteenth dynasty, who made Egypt one of the great empires of the ancient world " Professor Steindorf of the University of Leipsic, writing of this discovery to Professor Hilprecht of the University of Pennsylvania, remarked that its special importance "lies in the fact that Thutmosis I, the earliest king of the eighteenth dynasty, was also the first ruler to depart from the ancient custom of the Pharaohs, that of building in the desert lowland pyramidal tombs For himself he had a tomb hewn out of rock in the mountains. His predecessor, Amenophis I, according to custom, built his tomb in the plain, near the present site of Drah-abul-negge, as we know from written records. Thutmosis I, on the contrary, chose for his last dwelling-place the lonely and majestic valley in the Libyan Mountains. For centuries the Pharaohs followed his example, and during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth dynasties were built those magnificent sepulchers which in Roman times were still among the greatest curiosities of ancient Thebes. …
"Chief among the articles that Mr. Loret found in the tomb is a remarkably well-preserved papyrus containing texts from the Book of the Dead, with colored pictures finely executed; also a chest in which were kept a draught-board, with a full set of draughtmen, and some garlands; likewise fruit, food, poultry, and beef The last-mentioned articles, being intended for the sustenance of the dead, each one was wrapped in linen and enclosed in a wooden case, exactly corresponding to its form Thirteen large earthen beer jars, most of which, with their seals, stood there unmarred, and a large number of other vessels, had contained the beverages necessary for the refreshment of the dead. Weapons, among others two artistically wrought leathern quivers containing arrows, and two beautiful armchairs, completed this strange stock of
equipments The most remarkable piece of all is a large and beautifully preserved couch, the like of which has never been found in any other tomb It consists of a quadrangular wooden frame, overspread with a thick rush mat, and over this were stretched three layers of linen with a life-size figure of the god of death, Osiris, drawn upon the outer layer. The figure itself was smeared with some material intended to make the under layer waterproof. Over this, mingled with some adhesive substance, soil had been spread, in which barley was planted The grains had sprouted, and had grown to the height of from two and a half to three inches The whole, therefore, represented a couch whereon the dead Osiris lay figured in greensward Verily, a striking poetical idea, the resurrection of the dead symbolized by the picture of the barley springing up The whole tomb, with its numerous equipments, furnishes a very important contribution to the history of the methods of burial among the ancient Egyptians "
Sunday School Times, July 8, 1899.
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Egypt: Fall of eleven columns of the great temple at Karnak.
"From Professor Georg Steindorff, of the University of Leipsic, comes the following: 'In the covered colonnade of the great temple at Karnak extensive restorations have lately been undertaken, rendered necessary by a most deplorable accident, which, about a year ago, befell this grandest of all Egyptian edifices It occurred on the morning of October 3, 1899, in the colonnade which was built by Ramses I, Sethos I, and Ramses II, and which is doubtless familiar to all in engravings and photographs. In the northeastern part of this structure as many as eleven immense columns fell, and were totally wrecked, while several others are leaning over so that they might fall at any time By this event the magnificent structure has been utterly ruined, and it now presents a dreary aspect The cause of this catastrophe has not been definitely ascertained The first thought was of an earthquake, but nothing of the sort was experienced elsewhere in Egypt on the morning of the day above mentioned It is more likely that during the thirty-two hundred years of the building's existence, the material used in its construction had greatly deteriorated, and that this fact increased the possibility of a collapse Then, also, in the main hall during recent years, the work of excavation and restoration was carried on with little regard for the dilapidated condition of the temple, which was weakened rather than strengthened by this work But especially for the last four years, during the inundation of the Nile, the hall, by artificial means, has been flooded in order to extract and remove the salt which had formed. By this periodical flooding and drying of the ground the foundations have been very badly damaged This, according to Dr. Borchardt, is the prime cause of the ruin. First the ground gave way under a column, which then toppled, and, in falling, brought down the others with it.
"We must recognize the zeal with which the Egyptian Government, especially the department of Egyptian Antiquities, with its Director-General, Professor Maspero, came to the rescue of the ill-fated edifice To prevent further catastrophe, they first proceeded to remove the architraves from five of the endangered columns, and to reduce the height of the columns to about twenty feet. This was accomplished by filling with sand that portion of the hall in which the columns stood, and then rolling the separate parts down the inclined plane formed by the sand The north portion of the pylon terminating the colonnade toward the east that is, toward the Nile had badly suffered by the disaster There were cracks in it so large as to cause the fear that it might some day collapse After prompt and thorough work this danger also was obviated. Later on the ruins of the eleven fallen columns are to be removed, and the foundations of the hall examined Then everything possible will be done to make the ground solid, and the attempt will be made to erect again the ruined columns. But whether the beautiful colonnade will ever resume its former appearance, whether it will ever again make upon the visitor such an overpowering impression as formerly, may well be a matter of serious doubt Ancient Thebes has lost one of its most beautiful monuments '"
Sunday School Times, December 1, 1900.
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Egypt: Discovery of the Serapeion at Alexandria
"The excavations by Dr Botti, the Director of the Alexandrian Museum, in the neighborhood of Pompey's Pillar, have resulted in the discovery of the Serapeion, where the last of the great libraries of Alexandria was preserved An elaborate account of his researches, with an admirable plan, has been given by the discoverer in a memoir on 'L'Acropole d'Alexandrie et le Sérapeum,' presented to the Archæological Society of Alexandria Dr Botti was first led to make his explorations by a passage in the orator Aphthonios, who visited Alexandria about A D 315 "
American Journal of Archœology, January-arch, 1896.
{23}
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Crete:
Recent explorations
Supposed discovery of the Palace of Minos and the Cretan Labyrinth
Fresh light on prehistoric Greece and the origin of the alphabet.
Results of extraordinary importance have been already obtained from explorations in Crete, carried on during 1899 and 1900 by
the British School at Athens, under the direction of Mr D G Hogarth, and by Mr Arthur J Evans, of the Ashmolean Museum, working with the aid of a small Cretan Exploration Fund, raised in England The excavations of both parties were carried on at Knossos, but the latter was the most fortunate, having opened the site of a prehistoric palace which is yielding remarkable revelations of the legendary age in Crete In a communication to the "London Times" of October 31, 1900, Mr Evans gave the following account of the results so far as then obtained:
"The discoveries made at Knossos throw into the shade all the other exploratory campaigns of last season in the Eastern Mediterranean, by whatever nationality conducted. It is not too much to say that the materials already gathered have revolutionized our knowledge of prehistoric Greece, and that to find even an approach to the results obtained we must go back to Schliemann's great discovery of the Royal tombs at Mycenae The prehistoric site, of which some two acres have now been uncovered at Knossos, proves to contain a palace beside which those of Tiryns and Mycenae sink into insignificance. By an unhoped-for piece of good fortune the site, though in the immediate neighbourhood of the greatest civic centres of the island in ancient, medieval, and modern times, had remained practically untouched for over 3,000 years At but a very slight depth below the surface of the ground the spade has uncovered great courts and corridors, propylaea, a long succession of magazines containing gigantic store jars that might have hidden the Forty Thieves, and a multiplicity of chambers, pre-eminent among which is the actual throne-room and council-chamber of Homeric kings. The throne itself, on which (if so much faith be permitted to us) Minos may have declared the law, is carved out of alabaster, once brilliant with coloured designs and relieved with curious tracery and crocketed arcading which is wholly unique in ancient art and exhibits a strange anticipation of 13th century Gothic. In the throne-room, the western entrance gallery, and elsewhere, partly still adhering to the walls, partly in detached pieces on the floors, was a series of fresco paintings, excelling any known examples of the art in Mycenaean Greece. A beautiful life-size painting of a youth, with a European and almost classically Greek profile, gives us the first real knowledge of the race who produced this mysterious early civilization Other frescoes introduce us to a lively and hitherto unknown miniature style, representing, among other subjects, groups of women engaged in animated conversation in the courts and on the balconies of the Palace. The monuments of the sculptor's art are equally striking It may be sufficient to mention here a marble fountain in the shape of a lioness's head with enamelled eyes, fragments of a frieze with beautifully cut rosettes, superior in its kind to anything known from Mycenae; an alabaster vase naturalistically copied from a Triton shell; a porphyry lamp with graceful foliation supported on an Egyptianising lotus column The head and parts of the body of a magnificent painted relief of a bull in gesso duro are unsurpassed for
vitality and strength
"It is impossible here to refer more than incidentally to the new evidence of intercourse between Crete and Egypt at a very remote period supplied by the Palace finds of Knossos It may be mentioned, however, as showing the extreme antiquity of the earlier elements of the building that in the great Eastern Court was found an Egyptian seated figure of diorite, broken above, which can be approximately dated about 2000 B C Below this again extends a vast Stone Age settlement which forms a deposit in some places 24 ft in thickness
"Neither is it possible here to dwell on the new indications supplied by some of the discoveries in the 'House of Minos' as to the cult and religious beliefs of its occupants It must be sufficient to observe that one of the miniature frescoes found represents the façade of a Mycenaean shrine and that the Palace itself seems to have been a sanctuary of the Cretan God of the Double Axe, as well as a dwelling place of prehistoric kings. There can be little remaining doubt that this huge building with its maze of corridors and tortuous passages, its medley of small chambers, its long succession of magazines with their blind endings, was in fact the Labyrinth of later tradition which supplied a local habitation for the Minotaur of grisly fame The great figures of bulls in fresco and relief that adorned the walls, the harem scenes of some of the frescoes, the corner stones and pillars marked with the labrys or double axe the emblem of the Cretan Zeus, explaining the derivation of the name 'Labyrinth' itself are so many details which all conspire to bear out this identification In the Palace-shrine of Knossos there stands at last revealed to us the spacious structure which the skill of Daedalus is said to have imitated from the great Egyptian building on the shore of Lake Moeris, and with it some part at least of his fabled masterpieces still clinging to the walls.
"But, brilliant as are the illustrations thus recovered of the high early civilization of the City of Minos and of the substantial truth of early tradition, they are almost thrown into the shade by a discovery which carries back the existence of written documents in the Hellenic lands some seven centuries beyond the first known monuments of the historic Greek writing. In the chambers and magazines of the Palace there came to light a series of deposits of clay tablets, in form somewhat analogous to the Babylonian, but inscribed with characters in two distinct types of indigenous prehistoric script one hieroglyphic or quasi-pictorial, the other linear. The existence of a hieroglyphic script in the island had been already the theme of some earlier researches by the explorer of the Palace, based on the more limited material supplied by groups of signs on a class of Cretan seal-stones, and the ample corroboration of the conclusions arrived at was, therefore, the more satisfactory These Cretan hieroglyphs will be found to have a special importance in their bearing on the origin of the Phoenician alphabet
"But the great bulk of the tablets belonged to the linear class, exhibiting an elegant and much more highly-developed form of script, with letters of an upright and singularly European aspect. The inscriptions, over 1,000 of which were collected, were originally contained in coffers of clay, wood, and gypsum, which had been in turn secured by clay seals impressed with finely-engraved signets and counter-marked and counter-signed by controlling officials in the same script while the clay was still wet The clay documents themselves are, beyond doubt, the Palace archives. Many relate to accounts concerning the Royal Arsenal, stores, and treasures Others, perhaps, like the contemporary cuneiform tablets, refer to contracts or correspondence The problems attaching to the decipherment of these clay records are of enthralling interest, and we have here locked up for us materials which may some day enlarge the bounds of history."
In an earlier communication to "The Times" (September 15), Mr. Evans had explained more distinctly the importance of the clay tablets found at Knossos, as throwing light on the origin of the alphabet: "In my excavation of the pre-historic Palace at Knossos," he wrote, "I came upon a series of deposits of clay tablets, representing the Royal archives, the inscriptions on which belong to two distinct systems of writing one hieroglyphic and quasi-pictorial; the other for the most part linear and much more highly developed Of these the hieroglyphic class especially presents a series of forms answering to what, according to the names of the Phoenician letters, we must suppose to have been the original pictorial designs from which these, too, were derived A series of conjectural reconstructions of the originals of the Phoenician letters on this line were in fact drawn out by my father, Sir John Evans, for a lecture on the origin of the alphabet given at the Royal Institution in 1872, and it may be said that two-thirds of these resemble almost line for line actual forms of Cretan hieroglyphics The oxhead (Aleph), the house (Beth), the window (He), the peg (Vau), the fence (Cheth), the hand (Yod) seen sideways, and the open palm (Kaph), the fish (Nun), the post or trunk (Samekh), the eye (Ain), the mouth, (Pe), the teeth (Shin), the cross-sign (Tau), not to speak of several other probable examples, are all literally reproduced.
"The analogy thus supplied is indeed overwhelming. It is impossible to believe that, while on one side of the East Mediterranean basin these alphabetic prototypes were naturally evolving themselves, the people of the opposite shore were arriving at the same result by a complicated process of selection and transformation of a series of hieratic Egyptian signs derived from quite different objects The analogy with the Cretan hieroglyphic forms certainly weighs strongly in favour of the simple and natural explanation of the origin of the Phoenician letters which was held from the time of Gesenius onwards, and was only disturbed by the extremely ingenious, though over-elaborate, theory of De Rougé."
At the annual meeting of the subscribers to the British School at Athens, held in London, October 30, 1900, Mr Hogarth, the Director, spoke with great enthusiasm of the significance of the Cretan discoveries already made, and of the promise of enlarged knowledge which they gave. He said: "The discovery made 25 years ago [by Schliemann] that no barbarians, but possessors of a very high and individual culture, preceded the Hellenic period in Greece a culture which could not but have affected the Hellenic had been developed in various ways since It had been established that this culture had had a very long existence and development; it covered completely a large geographical area; it developed various local characteristics in art production which seemed to be gathered again into one by the typical art of Mycenae But the most important historical points remained obscure. Where was the original home of this new civilization; what family did the race or races belong to; of what speech were they and what religions; what was the history of their societies and art during their dominance, and what became of them after? Neither mainland Greece nor the Aegean islands answered these But there were two unknown quantities, Crete and Asia Minor, with Rhodes One of these we have now attacked Crete by its great size and natural wealth, its position, and its mythologic fame was bound to inform us of much It is too early to say that the questions will all be answered by Crete, but already we have much light The discovery of written documents and of shrines has told us more than any other evidence of the origin and family The Knossos frescoes show us the racial type; the Dictaean, Cave, and Knossos houses illuminate the religion New arts have been discovered, and the relation to Egypt and Asia are already far better understood It remains now to find the early tombs, and clear the lower stratum of the Palace ruins at Knossos, to know more of the earliest Cretan race, to explore the cast or 'Eteocretan' end of the island, to obtain light on the language and relations to Egypt and Asia, and to investigate the 'Geometric' period, which is the transition to the Hellenic "
Commenting in another place on the discoveries in Crete, Mr Hogarth has pointed out their effect in modifying the ideas heretofore entertained of the importance of Phoenician influence in the rise of European civilization. "For many years now," he writes, "we have had before our eyes two standing protests against the traditional claim of Phoenicia to originate European civilization, and those protests come from two regions which Phoenician influence, travelling west, ought first to have affected, namely, Cyprus and Asia Minor In both these regions exist remains of early systems of writing which are clearly not of Phoenician descent Both the Cypriote syllabic script and the 'Hittite' symbols must have been firmly rooted in their homes before ever the convenient alphabet of Sidon and Tyre was known there And now, since Mr Evans has demonstrated the existence of two non-Phoenician systems of writing in Crete also, the use of one of which has been proved to extend to the Cyclades and the mainland of
Greece, it has become evident that we have to deal in south-eastern Europe, as well as in Cyprus or Asia Minor, with a non-Phoenician influence of civilization which, since it could originate that greatest of achievements, a local script, was quite powerful enough to account by itself also for the local art.
{25}
"Those who continue to advocate the Phoenician claim do not seem sufficiently to realize that nowadays they have to take account neither only of the Homeric age nor only of even half a millennium before Homer, but of an almost geologic antiquity. Far into the third millennium B. C. at the very least, and more probably much earlier still, there was a civilization in the Aegean and on the Greek mainland which, while it contracted many debts to the East and to Egypt, was able to assimilate all that it borrowed, and to reissue it in an individual form, expressed in products which are not of the same character with those of any Eastern civilization that we know"
D. G. Hogarth,
Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane, part 2, pages 237-238 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).
"During the past season, Evans, discoverer of the now famous early Cretan systems of writing, Halbherr and other Italians, as well as the French, have been proving what was already foreshadowed, that in Crete we find in its purest form and in all its historic and racial phases that Mediterranean civilization, Pelasgic and Achæan, that culminated in Tiryns and Mykenae. We now see that Homer sings of the closing years of a culture that dates back of the 'Trojan 'War' at least for fifteen hundred years. Crete is found to be covered with ruined Pelasgic cities, surrounded by gigantic polygonal walls, crowned by acropoli, adorned with royal palaces, defended by forts, connected by artificial highways, and with necropoli of vaulted tombs like those discovered by Schliemann at Mykenae Already the royal palaces and libraries are being unearthed at Cnossos and 'Goulâs' with sculptures and decoration of the most novel description and early date A literature in an unknown tongue and in undeciphered scripts is being found, to puzzle scholars as much perhaps as the Hittite and Etruscan languages. Some day these 'Pelasgic' documents will disclose the secrets of a neglected civilization and fill up the gap between early Eastern and Hellenic cultures "
A. L. Frothingham, Jr., Archæological Progress (International Monthly, December, 1900).
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: India: Discovery of the birthplace, tomb and relics of Gautama Buddha,
See (in this volume) BUDDHA
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Troy:
Later researches on the site
"Dr Doerpfeld finished in 1894 the exploration which he had begun in 1893 on the site of the excavations of Schliemann at Hissarlik (Troia) It appears to be established that Schliemann, carried away by his zeal, had overlooked the very end which he wished to attain, and that the burnt city, which he thought to be the real Troia, is a more ancient foundation going back beyond the year 2000 B C M Doerpfeld discerned, in one of the layers of ruins (discovered but disregarded by Schliemann), a city which must be the Ilios of Priam contemporaneous with the Mykenai of Agamemnon; he removed the surrounding walls, the towers, and some of the houses that filled it. It is to be understood that this little acropolis, analogous to that of Tiryns, is not the whole of the city but simply its citadel, which Homer called 'Pergamos.' It was surrounded, lower down, by a city reserved for the habitation of the common people, some traces of which also have been found "
American Journal of Archœology, 1896.
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Italy:
Excavations at Antemnæ disclose what early Rome was probably like
"We can show what the earliest Rome was, the Rome of Romulus on the Palatine, and how it grew to be the City of the Seven Hills The City itself, crowded with the wrecks of twenty-five centuries, preserves to-day few memorials of its earliest age; but excavations made on two sites, one close to Rome, one a little further north in Etruria, explain the process very clearly The traveller who approaches Rome by the Via Salaria sees, just where Tiber and Anio join, a modern fort on an isolated rock Here was Antemnae, destroyed (according to legend) by Roman jealousy very soon after Rome itself was founded The legend seems to be true, at least in substance On this hilltop excavations have shown a little village within a wall of stone: it had its temple and senate-house, its water-cistern, and square huts, thatched or timbered, for dwelling-houses The relics found there shew that the site was abandoned, never to be again inhabited, about the time at which the legend fixes the fall of Antemnae Here we have Rome's earliest rival From the rival we may guess what the earliest Rome was like on the Palatine rock, and what all the little Italian towns were in their infancy"
F. Haverfield, Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane, part 2, pages 302-303 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Italy: The Etruscans
"During the decade which is now ending, archaeology has thrown some light on this strange people Researches in North Italy prove that it never entered the Peninsula from the north. Researches in Etruria itself prove that the earliest Etruscan civilization resembled that which prevailed in the Eastern Mediterranean in the last days of the Aegean period After all, the old legends were right. The ancients told how the Etruscans came from the east: archaeological evidence is now accumulating to confirm the legends. Precisely when they came or why is still obscure, nor can we identify them yet with any special tribe in pre-historic Greece, Pelasgian or other. Probably they were driven from their old homes, like the Phoenicians who built Carthage and the Phocaeans who built Marseilles "
F. Haverfield, Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane, part 2, page 305 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Italy:
Sunken Roman vessels in Lake Nemi
"A discovery during 1895 which made a great sensation throughout Italy, was that of the famous Roman vessels which had been sunk for so many centuries at the bottom of Lake Nemi, the existence of which has been known or suspected ever since the fifteenth century, notwithstanding many sceptics "
American Journal of Archœology July-September, 1896.
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Syria:
Ruined cities of the Roman Province
An important exploration of ruined cities in the old Roman provinces of Syria and Arabia was conducted by an American archæological expedition organized in 1899. Mr. Howard Crosby Butler, of Princeton, was in charge of the studies made in architecture, sculpture and archæological matters generally; Professor William K Prentice devoted attention to classical inscriptions, of which a great number were found, while Semitic inscriptions were the subjects of the study of Dr Enno Littmann, of the University of Halle. The ruins of thirty-three cities, nearly all of them evident places of large population in their day, were visited in regions now too bare of productive soil to support even the small nomadic population of the present day. "The desert conditions have preserved the cities intact as they stood at the time when they appear to have been abandoned, in the beginning of the seventh century" Some account of the expedition and its work is given in the "New York Tribune" of February 3, 1901.
----------ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: End--------
ARCTIC EXPLORATION, Recent
See (in this volume) POLAR EXPLORATION.
----------ARGENTINE REPUBLIC: Start--------
ARGENTINE REPUBLIC: A. D. 1895. Census
"According to the census, the number of persons in the Argentine Republic on May 10, 1895, was 4,042,990; the estimated number of Argentines outside the boundaries of the Republic on that day is placed at 50,000, thus making the total population 4,092,990 " Of this population 663,854 is in the city of Buenos Ayres. "The increase in the population between September 15, 1869 (the last census), and May 10, 1895 (the date on which the present census was taken), has been 2,218,776, equivalent to an increase of 120 per cent, or an annual increase of 4 6 per cent The urban population of the Republic has increased 1,045,944 It is estimated that there are 345,393 foreigners in the city of Buenos Ayres, and that the total number of foreigners in the Republic is about 1,000,000 Among the Argentine portion of the population, the females exceed the males in number, while it is estimated that two-thirds of the foreign population are males "
United States Consular Reports, November, 1896, page 438.
ARGENTINE REPUBLIC: A D 1895 Resignation of President Peña
President Saenz Peña having refused to issue, at the request of Congress, a decree of amnesty, extended to all persons implicated in the last revolution, his Cabinet resigned (January 16), and he found it impossible to form another Thereupon the President himself resigned his office, on the 22d of January, and his resignation was accepted by the Congress. Señor Uriburu was elected President on the following day, and promptly issued the desired decree
ARGENTINE REPUBLIC: A D 1898 Settlement of boundary dispute with Chile. Election of President
"A long unsettled dispute as to the extended boundary between the Argentine Republic and Chile, stretching along the Andean crests from the southern border of the Atacama Desert to Magellan Straits, nearly a third of the length of the South American continent, assumed an acute stage in the early part of the year, and afforded to this Government occasion to
express the hope that the resort to arbitration, already contemplated by existing conventions between the parties, might prevail despite the grave difficulties arising in its application I am happy to say that arrangements to this end have been perfected, the questions of fact upon which the respective commissioners were unable to agree being in course of reference to Her Britannic Majesty for determination A residual difference touching the northern boundary line across the Atacama Desert, for which existing treaties provided no adequate adjustment, bids fair to be settled in like manner by a joint commission, upon which the United States Minister at Buenos Aires has been invited to serve as umpire in the last resort "
Message of the President of the United States of America, December, 1898.
The arbitration of the United States Minister, Honorable William I. Buchanan, proved successful in the matter last referred to, and the Atacama boundary was quickly determined
In June, 1898, General Julio Roca was elected President and assumed the office in October. In July a treaty of arbitration was concluded with the government of Italy, which provides that there shall be no appeal from the decision of the arbitrators
----------ARGENTINE REPUBLIC: End--------
ARGON, The Discovery of
See (in this volume) SCIENCE, RECENT: CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS.
ARICA, The question concerning
See (in this volume) CHILE: A D 1894-1900
ARMENIA: A D 1895-1899
Revolt against Turkish oppression Massacres and atrocities of the conflict. Final concessions
See (in this volume)
TURKEY: A. D. 1895; 1896 (JANUARY-MARCH); 1896 (AUGUST); 1899 (OCTOBER)
ARMENIA: A D 1896
Attack of Armenian revolutionists on the Ottoman Bank and subsequent massacre of Armenians in Constantinople
See (in this volume) TURKEY; A. D. 1896 (AUGUST).
ARMIES, European and American:
Their numbers and cost compared
See (in this volume) WAR BUDGETS
ARMY ADMINISTRATION, American: Investigation of
See (in this volume)
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1898-1899.
ARMY CANTEEN, Abolition of the American.
See (in this volume)
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A D 1901 (FEBRUARY)
ARMY, United States: Act to increase to 100,000 men.
See (in this volume)
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A D 1901 (FEBRUARY)
ASHANTI:
British occupation of the country Rising of the tribes Siege and relief of Kumassi
In 1895, King Prempeh, of Ashanti, provoked a second expedition of British troops against his capital, Kumassi, or Coomassie, by persistence in slave-catching raids and in human sacrifices, and by other violations of his treaty engagements.
For some account of the former expedition
See, in volume 2, ENGLAND: A D 1873-1880)
Late in the year a strong force was organized in Gold Coast Colony, mostly made up of native troops. It marched without resistance to Kumassi, which it entered on the 17th of January, 1896. Prempeh made complete submission, placing his crown at the feet of the Governor of the Gold Coast; but he was taken prisoner to Sierra Leone. A fort was built, and garrisoned in the center of the town, and the country was then definitely placed under British protection, politically attached to the Gold Coast Colony It submitted quietly to the practical conquest until the spring of 1900, when a fierce and general rising of the tribes occurred It was said at the time that the outbreak was caused by efforts of the British to secure possession of a "golden stool" which King Prempeh had used for his throne, and which had been effectually concealed when Kumassi was taken in 1896; but this has been denied by Sir Frederic Hodgson, the Governor of the Gold Coast "The 'golden stool,'" he declared, "was only an incident in the affair and had nothing to do with the cause of the rising, which had been brewing for a long time.
